Per this discussion, here's a patch to implement both levenshtein() and

metaphone() in a contrib. There seem to be a fair number of different
approaches to both of these algorithms. I used the simplest case for
levenshtein which has a cost  of 1 for any character insertion, deletion, or
substitution. For metaphone, I adapted the same code from CPAN that the PHP
folks did.

A couple of questions:
1. Does it make sense to fold the soundex contrib together with this one?

2. I was debating trying to add multibyte support to levenshtein (it would
make no sense at all for metaphone), but a quick search through the contrib
directory found no hits on the word MULTIBYTE. Should worry about adding
multibyte support to levenshtein()?

Joe Conway

contrib/fuzzystrmatch/Makefile

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+subdir = contrib/fuzzystrmatch
+top_builddir = ../..
+include $(top_builddir)/src/Makefile.global
+
+# override libdir to install shlib in contrib not main directory
+libdir := $(libdir)/contrib
+
+# shared library parameters
+NAME= fuzzystrmatch
+SO_MAJOR_VERSION= 0
+SO_MINOR_VERSION= 1
+
+override CPPFLAGS := -I$(srcdir)/src/include $(CPPFLAGS)
+
+OBJS= fuzzystrmatch.o
+
+all: all-lib $(NAME).sql
+
+# Shared library stuff
+include $(top_srcdir)/src/Makefile.shlib
+
+
+$(NAME).sql: $(NAME).sql.in
+	sed -e 's:MODULE_PATHNAME:$(libdir)/$(shlib):g' < $< > $@
+
+install: all installdirs install-lib
+
+installdirs:
+	$(mkinstalldirs) $(DESTDIR)$(libdir)
+
+uninstall: uninstall-lib
+
+clean distclean maintainer-clean: clean-lib
+	rm -f $(OBJS) $(NAME).sql
+
+depend dep:
+	$(CC) -MM $(CFLAGS) *.c >depend
+
+ifeq (depend,$(wildcard depend))
+include depend
+endif